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Our Work

Executive Summary Face recognition is poised to become one of the most pervasive surveillance technologies, and law enforcement’s use of it is increasing rapidly. Today, law enforcement officers can use mobile devices to capture face recognition-ready photographs of people they stop on the street; surveillance cameras boast real-time face...

In the Internet’s early days, those wishing to register their own domain name had only a few choices of top-level domain to choose from, such as .com, .net, or .org. Today, users, innovators, and companies can get creative and choose from more than a thousand top-level domains, such as .cool...

Women’s health is big business. There are a staggering number of applications for Android and iOS which claim to help people keep track of their monthly cycle, know when they may be fertile, or track the status of their pregnancy. These apps entice the user to input the most intimate...

The role of Who Has Your Back is to provide objective measurements for analyzing the policies and advocacy positions of major technology companies when it comes to handing data to the government. We focus on a handful of specific, measurable criteria that can act as a vital stopgap against unfettered...

by Frida Alim, Nate Cardozo, Gennie Gebhart, Karen Gullo, and Amul KaliaDownload the report as a PDF.EXECUTIVE SUMMARYStudents and their families are backed into a corner. As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way the educational system treats...

How Police and Courts are Misusing Unreliable IP Address Information and What They Can Do to Better Verify Electronic Tips The digital revolution has given law enforcement more tools to help track and identify us than ever before. Yet as law enforcement increasingly relies on electronic evidence to investigate crimes...

Journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates, have been targets of an online phishing and malware campaign we believe was carried out on behalf of the government of Kazakhstan. We are releasing our report on the campaign today.
This...

We live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic...

Every year, the United States publishes a report on countries that, in the opinion of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), fail to give “adequate and effective” protection to U.S. holders of intellectual property rights. This Special 301 Report names and shames nations that do not meet a vague and impossibly...

The "Defend Innovation" whitepaper is the culmination of two-and-a-half years worth of research, drawing from the stories, expertise, and ideas of more than 16,500 people who agree that the current patent system is broken.
Split into two parts, the report covers both the challenges facing innovators under the current patent...

When somebody wants to silence speech, they often use the quickest method available. When the speech is hosted on a major online platform, that method is usually a copyright or trademark complaint. For many years, EFF has worked with people whose lawful speech has been unfairly targeted by these sorts...

The “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. The law was ostensibly intended to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works. In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used...

Introduction Imagine that you run a business, and one day you ask your lawyer whether selling one of your products could lead to a lawsuit. She tells you that the product is well-designed and responsibly marketed, but there’s still a chance that someone might get injured, and sue you. But...